IGs: IRS, SSA and DHS lose billions in improper payments

The Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration and Homeland Security Department all need to improve their methods of recovering and reporting improper payments, according to several recent inspector general reports.

The IRS made an estimated $14 billion to $17 billion in improper payments related to the Earned Income Tax Credit Program in fiscal 2011, according to a March 22 report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. That amounts to an improper payment rate of 21 percent to 26 percent.

Furthermore, the IRS has not fully complied with the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act of 2010, the report said.

Under that law, federal agencies are required to report improper payments and set targets to reduce them. However, the IRS has not set those targets and has not fully complied with the law with respect to the earned income credits, the inspector general wrote in the report.

"The IRS's failure to fully comply with this important Federal law is troubling," J. Russell George, Treasury inspector general for tax administration, said in a news release. “The law requires the IRS to establish annual reduction targets for improper payments; however, it has not done so." He made no recommendations in the report.

IRS officials said they have plans in place to establish reduction targets and are testing the feasibility of computing an improper payment estimate for earned income underpayments.

At the SSA, the inspector general found problems with improper payments with regard to wives and husbands who are due to receive Social Security benefits for a deceased spouse while also being recipients of government pensions on their own, according to a March 21 report. In those cases, the SSA is supposed to reduce the amount of the spousal benefit by an amount called the government pension offset.

Based on an investigation of a random sample from a pool of 3,200 such beneficiaries, the inspector general estimated that 925 beneficiaries were overpaid about $16.6 million because of SSA gaps in administering the regulations.

“SSA did not always monitor beneficiaries’ pension entitlement dates or take prompt action to initiate Government Pension Offset actions,” the report said. “SSA needed to improve its controls and procedures to ensure GPO was timely and accurately applied.”

At DHS, the inspector general’s office contracted with KPMG to determine whether DHS complied with the improper payments law last year. The auditing company found no instances of noncompliance, according to the March 13 report. At the same time, the inspector general recommended that DHS improve its controls over improper payment testing and reporting.

The greatest amount of improper payments at the department in fiscal 2011 were reported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with $108 million in improper payments, which equated to an improper payment rate of 8 percent. ICEs total payments were $1.3 billion.

The second highest was at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with $68 million in improper payments, which equated to an improper payment rate of 2 percent. FEMA’s total pool of payments as $3.7 billion.

On the whole, DHS had an improper payment rate of 2 percent, or $210 million improper out of a pool of $12.7 billion, the report said.

Federal agencies reported an estimated $125 billion in improper payments in fiscal 2010. Those included all payments made to the wrong person, or made for an incorrect reason or amount or at the wrong time.